How Tomcat Works: A Guide to Developing Your Own Java Servlet Container

From what I've come to understand, this is a self-published title, and for that, I would say that they did quite a good job at it. If it were a book published by A&W or ORA I would have subtracted a star or two for bad editing, because it does have its fair share of typos and it could do with some proper editing.So when I give this 4 stars it is solely based on the merits of the content.I like the idea of the book. They use the internal APIs of Tomcat and then successively implement the various components. As the book progresses the components become more and more complete.This is a good way of learning about a piece of software. I'd love more books to follow this format. If A&W or ORA were to offer these people a publishing deal, tighten up the writing and make some of the code more focused, I'd buy that book even though I own this one already.

I have been working in the past 4 years as an architect for several high-profile industrial strength web sites (i.e. 1,500-27,000 tps) and they all use tomcat for their back end. The common thing I have found is that out-of-the-box tomcat won't support this kind of transaction rate and some tweaking is needed. For example the threading model doesn't fly, and obviously stickiness isn't an option. I got this book to understand the code base better and to see where and how the modifications could best be made. This book is definitely for contianer/server engineers. I doubt' much bnenefit would come if you are just a servlet or jsp type. But if you are having performance problems, want to develop your own container, or are an architect for highly-scalable sites that use ro want to use tomcat then I recommend this book.

A very useful and complete book for who want undestand tomcat machine, with very useful examples.

I was tempted to only give this book 3 stars, but it does in fact do what it claims to do - explain how tomcat works, literally line by line. Because it starts with the most basic example and then builds on each component one at a time, this is a book best read cover to cover. Many of the subsequent example applications assume knowledge explained in previous chapters, so I had trouble using it as the reference I had hoped for.My biggest problem with this book is that is just stops short in so many places. In general the writing is very dry, even for a technical topic such as this. Additionally, the formatting of the book makes much of it hard to follow... the code seems to flow right into the text in parts. I believe this book was published independently, so I imagine there were budget constraints, but in this case I believe it sorely hurt the readability of the book. The authors' convention of class naming is also highly irregular and leads to much confusion in regards to which version of which class is being referenced. Finally, I was highly upset to see that the author doesn't touch on the inndards of Coyote (Tomcat5's new Connector) at all, even though it claims to "cover Tomcat 4 and 5". This is a highly significant package that is essential to understanding how connectors work in Tomcat5.If you have the time and desire to learn Tomcat from the ground up, this should be fine. However, if you're looking for a reference for a specific part of Tomcat (such as the Connector, in my case), you might want to look further.

This is best book to sit and read near by a fire but additionally you need a computer with you from time to time. I was very much pleased with the way author had described the interior design of Tomcat with reference to Catalina from a very simple component to the complex one. This book will sure help you to learn the big picture of Tomcat and its components and will also help you to run sample application servers.It is highly recommended to download the code and use them as reference while reading and testing the chapters. This book covers both Tomcat 4 and 5 with a tiny note what has been changed from Tomcat 4 to 5.I also liked the UML diagram and the collaboration diagram at the beginning of each/some chapters, this gives you the big picture of the package/class structure before you get into the very detail of every java classAfter reading this book, if you happen to see some runtime errors from Tomcat, you will sure be able to say where and why it is happeningThe book also act as a best documentation for entire Tomcat package, which you will not get even if you spend days on Tomcat website.I would also recommend this book to any java programmer who want to see how a complex tool like Tomcat was build, which in-turn can help you to apply that knowledge while building your own in-house software.

Expected 2nd edition